Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Drowning in Sea Level Nonsense

By Alan
Caruba

New York
Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D) and forty members of Congress believe the sea
levels are rising, that a panel should be created to determine what should be
done, and, of course, to throw billions of dollars at a problem that does not
exist. Politicians were eager to scare the public with the discredited global
warming hoax and now they have found a new one.

In New
York City, Mayor Bloomberg has proposed a $20 billion flood barrier system to
protect the city from future hurricanes and rising sea levels. Well, hurricanes
like tropical storm Sandy are real, but rare. Rising sea levels, however,
represent no threat at all.

William
Happer who researched ocean physics for the U.S. Air Force and is currently a
physics professor at Princeton University notes that “The sea level has been
rising since 1800, at the end of the ‘little ice age’”, a cooling cycle last
from around 1300 to 1850. Far from heating up, the Earth entered a new cooling
cycle around 1996 or so.

Harrison
Schmitt, a former Apollo 17 astronaut, U.S. Senator, and a geologist, says
“Predicting a sea level rise of seven feet over the next few thousand years
would seem too risky a prediction on which to spend tax dollars” and that is
surely an understatement. Wasting billons on “climate change”, however, is the
new siren call of the Obama administration, but the National Research Council
is warning, as Fox News reported, “that those kinds of subsidies are virtually
useless at quelling greenhouse gases.”

In fact,
as the amount of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas—alleged to “trap”
heat—has risen and has had zero effect on the cooling cycle.

A recent
article in the British newspaper, The Register, reported on a study by
scientists in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, that was
published in “Nature Geoscience” that concluded there was no “scientific
consensus” to suggest the rate of the seas’ rise will accelerate dangerously.

The notion
of the seas rising, swamping coastal cities, and creating havoc is the stuff of
science fiction, not science. This is why spending millions or billions on the
assertions of some who have a real stake in keeping the public frightened is a
very bad idea.

At the
center of the global warming scare campaign is the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Its most recent report said
that “no long-term acceleration of sea level has been identified using 20th-century
data alone” but that does not discourage the IPCC from forecasting an increase
due to global warming. This organization should be disbanded and, if I were in
charge, many of its leaders would be in jail right now for fraud.

Who can
you believe? One such person is Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, the former chair of the
Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden.
He is the past president (1999-2003) of the International Union for Quaternary
ResearchCommission on Sea Level Changes and
Coastal Evolution. He has been studying sea level and its effects on coastal
areas for more than 35 years. I cited his credentials because others making
predictions lack the same level of authority.

Dr. Morner
acknowledges that “sea level was indeed rising from, let us say, 1850 to
1930-40. And that rise had a rate in the
order of 1 millimeter per year. (Emphasis added). Get out your pocket ruler
and look at what one millimeter represents. It is small. It is very small. Not
surprisingly Dr. Morner is very critical of the IPCC and its headline-grabbing
doomsday predictions. He scorns the IPCC’s claim to “know” that facts about sea
level rise, noting that real scientists “are searching for the answer” by
continuing to collect data “because we are field geologists; they are computer
scientists. So all this talk that sea level is rising, this stems from the
computer modeling, not from observations. The observations don’t find it!”

A recent
paper reviewed by CO2 Science finds that sea levels have risen from 2002-2011
at a rate of only 1.7 millimeters per year over the past 110 years, the
equivalent of 6.7 inches per century. This is close to Dr. Morner’s assertion
that, at most, there has been a rate of increase that tops out at 1.1
millimeter per year. The review concluded that there is no evidence of any
human influence on sea levels.

Even so,
in early July a scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Josh Willis,
told Fox News, that “There is no question that the time to prepare for sea
level rise is now…We will definitely see seven feet of sea level rise—the only
question is when.” And who funds NASA?

Between
the scientists trying to gin up more government money for their agencies and
departments and the politicians trying to find a new reason to spend more
money, the public is left wondering if the oceans are rising and whether that
represents something worth worrying about. The answer is (a) yes, sea levels
are rising in infinitesimal amounts
and (b) no, we need to stop spending money based on such claims.

It’s not
the sea level rise you should worry about. It is the rising levels of national
debt and the deficit.

2 comments:

The space between each line on a cigarette is 1mm. How ridiculous is this?Automobiles are damn near zero emissions today. When is it time to say enough is enough?I just bought the new book "New Frontiers of Space/From Mars to the Edge of the Universe". A fascinating book that is a real eye opener to just how small we are. It should be required reading for every nut hell bent on Global Warming.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.